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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Weighing the alternatives

In the Middle Ages, they had guillotines, stretch racks, whips and chains. Nowadays, we have a much more effective torture device called the bathroom scale. ~ Stephen Phillips

Ain't that the truth?!

People the world over have a set of scales in their house, usually in the bathroom, and they spend incredible amounts of time hopping on and off them. Digital scales, dial scales, you name it, we've got it. We get up in the morning and step on the scales. We go to the bathroom and we step on the scales again, just to see how much weight we lost by peeing. We have breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks and after every meal we stand on the scale to see the change. It can drive us nuts.

Personally I have an older dial scale in the bathroom but it only goes up to 130 kgs. Only. HA! That's a lot. And yet, I'm still not there.

I have a Wii Fit which will weigh me but I can stand on it 5 times in 5 minutes and it will give me a different weight every time. Plus, it weighs me at 4 kgs LIGHTER than the Weight Watchers scales.

This obsession that we have with scales and constantly weighing ourselves in not healthy! Our weight can easily fluctuate up to 2.2 kgs (5 lbs) a DAY, so why do we put ourselves through it?

Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on:

~ how satisfied we're feeling through the day? ~ our measurements over the course of a month? ~ the way our clothes are fitting? ~ how much exercise we've managed to do that week?

I see the desire to chart our weight, I just don't see the point in doing it daily or multiple times a day. It's great to keep an eye on our weight, but dangerous to become obsessed with it.

I weigh in on Wednesdays. I stand on my bathroom scale and wish that it would magically drop below the 130 kgs mark, but the scale I depend on, the scale I go by, is the one at Weight Watchers.

If you are someone who stands on your scale more than once (or twice) a week, I beg of you to put it in the deep dark recesses of a closet somewhere until you have broken yourself of the desire to jump on it. Start looking at other ways to measure your success, that will support the numbers on the scale. Start believing in those other ways so that if the scale shows a gain, you can look at your measurements or your clothes and say to yourself "my weight may have gone up this week but you know what? I feel great!"

As for me? I'll continue to weigh in at WW, but I'm going to put the bathroom scales away for now. It doesn't matter how much I plead with them, they don't want to drop below 130 just yet anyway. So they can just bugger off until they're willing to cooperate.

4 comments:

Yep... I call this scale abuse. And I am a confessed scale abuser. It messes with your mind that's for sure. I try to weigh no more than 2-3 times a week... down from probably 10, so it is an improvement. I have a full category of tags on it on my blog LOL!

My scale is being attacked by the rabid dust bunnies that live under my bed, which is a fate that is too good for it, if you ask me. Once a month is about all I can handle - I'd much prefer kicking myself over not exercising than kicking myself over numbers. *kick, kick, kick*